Beating Louisville Rush Hour

Everybody hates traffic, myself included.

To combat the traffic I subscribe to XM Radio, which certainly helps with the stress (free 3-day trial) and I use the Louisville traffic webcams on http://www.trimarc.org.

Like the cams in many other cities, the Louisville traffic cams are a really handy way to check traffic conditions before you get out on the highway. I even made a couple of SharePoint webparts using the camera images from the Trimarc website. Now I just load the http://companyweb homepage, hit F5 to refresh the pictures, and I'm out the door.

But invariably I'll be in a hurry, forget to check the traffic cam, and drive right into gridlock. And this usually happens when I'm already running late (or have to go to the bathroom – Murphy's Law).

Since the Trimarc website isn't well-suited for the small screen, I sometimes call back to the office and ask someone to jump on http://companyweb/ to tell me what the traffic looks like up ahead. Unless, of course, everyone has aleady left for the day (Murphy's Law again).

Well, recently one of my geek wishes came true.

Trimarc has added a special sub-site for mobile devices: http://www.trimarc.org/mobile/index.html

So if you live in the Louisville Metro, even if you don’t have a Pocket PC or Smart Phone, you can still surf the site in a normal web browser to check road conditions before rush hour. Or use your mobile device while stuck in traffic to see which lane you should be in. It's very quick, and easy as pie.

Now if you get stuck in traffic, you have no one to blame but yourself.

P.S. If you’d like one of the SharePoint web parts for the traffic cams, shoot me an e-mail and I’ll send you the .DWP file. Even if you're new to SharePoint, it's pretty easy to roll your own web parts once you've seen how to do it.